The Cloud and the Power Grid

The Cloud and The Power Grid

Are flexible resources to the power system what servers are to the cloud? It’s a useful analogy to build on, and at Beebop we are relying quite strongly on some of the learning from the cloud revolution over the past decades, as an indicator of what is waiting for the power system in the renewable energy revolution.

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Observability

As companies slowly started to move their servers from centralized server rooms on-premise to decentralized data centers around the world, it became increasingly hard to maintain a good overview on the servers’ utilization. As system administrators adapted, they needed new tools to make the disparate hardware manageable. Datadog and other companies offered cloud monitoring services and grew virally in developer communities.

Energy companies now, similarly, have seen generation and storage move from centralized power plants to decentralized assets, many of which are located behind their customers' energy meters. It will become increasingly important for energy companies to be able to monitor

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Background optimization

With an exponential growth of different internet applications, it became clear that many of them were wrestling with similar challenges: how to deliver a top experience to their end-users across the world. Website latency in rendering content in Europe for content generated in the US was one such example. Hence, a new set of product companies emerged to deliver the content in a highly optimized way, carefully managing memory caching in distributed hardware across the world. Content Delivery Network companies such as Cloudflare became behemoths of the cloud revolution on this problem alone.

The power grid now, similarly, is seeing the need to manage the power flexibility of distributed energy resources, in a way to deliver performant grid applications. This can be delivery speed, fidelity of power delivery or other features that make Virtual Power Plants into useful resources to the power system.

None of these analogies are perfect, but we learn as much as possible from them as we build out the power system of the future.